


Diamond in the Rough

by TheBee



Series: The Riches of Gallifrey [3]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Sex, Angst, Episode AU: s01e01 Rose, F/M, NSFW, Smut, Telepathic Bond, Telepathic Sex, Telepathy, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 01:10:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4459520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBee/pseuds/TheBee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Rose, only 30 seconds passed before he’d come back to ask her again. For the Doctor, it was a whole day...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diamond in the Rough

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Passing By](https://archiveofourown.org/works/177125) by [misscam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misscam/pseuds/misscam). 



> As I do not have sufficient chapters to post in Pearl of Great Price, I offer this stand-alone tale in its place. My profound thanks to misscam, Hawkerin and The Doctor Mulder for their inspiration.

The Doctor almost dropped his leather jacket into the mud of Pollux 4 when he saw Rose Tyler leaning against the TARDIS. If he hadn’t been so impressive, his jaw would have dropped open. As it was, he felt his hearts stutter.

“You said no.”

“You didn’t tell me you travel through time.”

“Then how are you here?”

She turned her warm hazel eyes on him, pulling a chain from inside her hoodie. The key on the end of it slid effortlessly into the TARDIS lock. She pushed the door open and waved him in.

“Fantastic.” She’d come with him, after all. In fact, now she had to. He grinned.

~~~ * ~~~

Once inside the TARDIS, he strode up the ramp to send his magnificent ship into the Vortex. Reaching the dematerialization lever, he recoiled from the shock she sent through his fingers. “Oi!” he demanded. “None of that!”

“You can’t dematerialize, Doctor,” Rose Tyler said behind him. “This me is still on board.”

Reality came crashing down. He turned toward her. “I don’t get to keep this you, do I?” he asked, already knowing the answer. “We don’t even get an adventure together.”

She smiled. “Oh, we get an adventure,” she replied and gave him that wide and generous smile. Big enough to wrap around two hearts. He reached out and gripped her hand, dropping his shields in the safety of the TARDIS to hear the faint buzz of her human thoughts.

Terror laced through him and he flung her hand away, his other hand diving into his jacket pocket for his sonic. He pointed it at her, furious.

“Who are you?”

She frowned at him. “I’m Rose Tyler.”

“Rose Tyler is human. Nice try, but you’re not human.”

“What are yo—?” she demanded, then her eyes widened. “Oh. Yeah.” She dropped to her bum on the grating. “I forgot. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting.” She beat the heels of her hands against her forehead. “Stupid stupid stupid STUPID chav! Oh, god, I’m so stupid.”

“Tell me who you are.”

“Just scan me, Theta, please?”

Her question—his old schooltime name—unnerved him more. He clicked a setting on the sonic, particle wave disruption, number 519, and pointed it at her head. “WHO ARE YOU!?” he bellowed.

“I’m Rose Tyler”—at his dismissive snort, she added—“and they put me in this body. Just scan me, Doctor. I’ll sit here and I won’t do anything. Just—just scan me. Please?”

Psychometric corporeal transference. Someone could have done that to her. That would explain the unusual mental signature… he flicked to setting 202, physiological scan, and checked the readings. A cold pit grew in his gut. He slapped the sonic against his hand, then scanned himself. Standard readings for this body. He turned the sonic on her, scanned and checked the readings. He staggered back, shaking his head.

“You’re not possible.”

“He said you’d think that.”

His hearts clenched. “You are NOT POSSIBLE!” he screamed, throwing the sonic across the console room. “What are you?!”

“I’m Rose Tyler!”

“You are not! What are you?!”

“I’m Rose Tyler! Honest!”

He reached out and gripped this not-Rose thing by the lapels of its blue bomber jacket, yanked it off the floor and shook it. Its teeth clacked together as he slammed it up against a coral strut, bracing one forearm across its throat. Its double heartbeat pounded away under his forearm. “You are not possible. I killed them all,” he snarled in its face. “For the last time, what are you?”

Tears ran down its face, its Rose Tyler-shaped face, as it gasped and sobbed. “Your **_tehlsohka_** ,” it cried.

The claim only enraged the Doctor further. He pressed its body against the coral with his own and slapped two fingers up against its temples, pushing into its mind without permission or gentleness.

He sank into their mating bond like sinking into body-morph foam.

 _Rassilon, no._ He propelled himself backward as if shocked by the TARDIS console. Shame welled up into his throat, bitter and acrid, and drove him to his knees, heels of his hands grinding into his own eye sockets, nails scoring his own scalp. He wanted to gouge his own brain out, break his own bones, go back on his personal timeline, just to erase the evil of what he had just done. Forced himself on someone else’s mind. Someone who’d been telling the truth all along. The sour coil of self-recrimination unfolded in his gut.

“Doctor?” Her voice was rough and raw. From the pressure he’d put on her larynx. He had almost crushed that voice out of her. He wondered if he could join the White Penitents and flog himself across Italy for that crime. If he bled enough, could he wash himself clean of it?

He heard the sonic whirr and looked up. She was aiming it at her own throat, with complete ease and confidence. His breath caught. But she had the correct setting: 125. Gallifreyan tissue regenerator. She smiled at him. How could she smile at him? How could she even look at him? He hunched, trying to make himself smaller.

Rose Tyler was a Time Lord. And his—his **wife**.

He curled down to the grating.

And he’d almost killed her.

~~~ * ~~~

“Doctor?”

He was still kneeling on the console room floor, forehead resting on the grating. The metal biting into his knees and brow hurt far less than he deserved. If he stayed down here, he’d never have to look her in the eyes and see what he had done.

“Oh, Theta.” She was dropping to her knees next to him, her hands stroking down his spine, comforting him—him! As if he ought to have comfort! He pushed himself up on his hands, seeing the terra cotta dots form on the grating as his Gallifreyan blood dripped from the cut on his brow. She shuffled over in front of him and pushed him upright. The sonic whirred again and the cut closed. He opened his eyes but kept his gaze downcast. She gripped his head in both hands and turned his face to hers.

He couldn’t meet her eyes. He wasn’t worthy to meet her eyes, hold her hand or look at her face. He wasn’t even worthy to look at her shoes.

She stroked his cheekbones with her thumbs, fingertips brushing the curve of his ears. “Doctor?” she asked. His shame-filled silence made her sigh. She reached down and grasped his hand, pressed his two fingers to her lips, then touched them to her temple as she mirrored the action on him. He dropped all his shields, opened all his doors. He had no right to any privacy or protection now. Anything she wished to do, she had every right to do.

Rose Tyler walked the halls of his mind, gently closing doors to his most painful, shame-filled memories, as if she knew where they all were, without looking in. The torment of the Time War, she shut the most gently of all, and kissed the doorway tenderly. He trembled before her kindness as she drew near the core of his memories, the center of himself.

She reached out, her psychic self gripping the hand of his psychic self. Her thought-murmur shook him to the foundations of his identity, as all that he was gave way and yielded to her.

“ ** _Tehln_** ,” she thought/said. _Mine._

He opened his eyes.

~~~ * ~~~

Her face was tipped up to his, her Gallifreyan breath cool on his face, as he gazed down at her. Her eyes fluttered open to meet his, her emotions playing across his mindscape.

_: : Gratitude. Lust. Joy. Concern. Love. : :_

His respiratory bypass failed him and he found himself sucking in a sudden gasp of air. “You can’t love me.”

Her strong but gentle—oh, so gentle!—mental hands reached into his self-recrimination and took it from him, sunk it into her own heart—hearts!—and rose up on her knees to meet him eye to eye. “I can and you can’t stop me,” she whispered. “You’re mine. And I’m yours.” She stood, in one smooth movement, and tugged on his jumper until he stood as well, leaving his leather jacket on the floor. He towered over her this way, and he didn’t feel worthy to stand taller than she.

She gripped his wrist and towed him through the TARDIS, stopping at a familiar door. His room. For when he did sleep. Which was rarely, since his Eighth life. That gentleman adventurer who’d become a war medic, performing triage on the universe, then giving up and regenerating into the best killer of all, who stupidly forced this him to survive it. There was no time to sleep. And he didn’t deserve the rest anyway. She pulled him inside and shut the door. She pointed the sonic at it to seal them in.

A faint smile drifted across her face. “Any clothes you don’t want torn off,” she murmured, “you’d better take off.” She peeled out of her jacket, loose trousers, blouse and knickers with efficiency while he gaped at her. She looked up to see him staring and her eyes darkened as her pupils widened with her arousal. “Doctor?”

“Eh?”

“Do you ever want to wear those denims again?” He blinked. “Kit off, Time Lord.”

He stripped swiftly.

~~~ * ~~~

He was as naked before her body as he was before her mind. He knew where this was going. He’d been carried along on her insistence, but…

“Don’t you dare.”

“Eh?”

“Don’t you **dare** even start. Because, I swear, if you open your mouth and say that you don’t deserve me or you don’t deserve this, that you don’t deserve time or attention or love,” the magnificent Rose Tyler said, “I swear I’m gonna slap you so hard you’re going to feel it in your next body. And the one after that.”

“But you and me? We”—he didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

“Yeah,” she said and smiled. “Well, not **this** you, but you. The next you. You’re the same person and I love you.”

He sank to his knees before her. “Rose, I’m never going to be clean of what I’ve done,” he said baldly. “Genocide is unforgiveable. The complete destruction of every cell of an entire race.”

She stepped closer, pulling his head against her smooth stomach and stroking his cropped hair. “Oh, Doctor—Theta”—her use of his old school name made him shudder with a secret pleasure—“cancer cells are alive, too. But we kill them, so the body they’re destroying can live.” He looked up at her, about to speak and she laid her fingertip across his lips, shaking her head. “The Time Lords were a cancer on the universe. Something good had gone very bad and was poisoning everything around it. You did the only thing a Doctor could do—you cut out the cancer.” Tears welled in her eyes as he slumped back on his heels. “Even though it cut you, you still thought of the universe first.” She knelt between his knees, stroking his cheekbones, his brow, his jaw. “I’m so sorry you had to. It wasn’t fair.”

“It wasn’t,” he grated, his voice squeezed with tears he refused to let fall.

“And if you need someone to forgive you,” she whispered, “I do.” She brushed her fingertips across his temple and he could feel her forgiveness and tenderness and fiery indignation that the Time Lords had forced him into that position, outraged on his behalf. He clutched her tightly to himself, hot tears leaking out despite his best efforts to keep them back. He, who was so frequently outraged at how others were abused across the universe, had never had anyone be outraged for **him** , for the ways Rassilon and his plans had twisted any choice he tried to make, poisoned every solution he tried to use. It unraveled a black, bitter knot that had been sitting between his hearts since his first moments in this body. He could muffle his sobs in her hair, but he couldn’t stop the tears.

She held on to him tightly, arms wrapped around his ribs, as his grief and pain spent themselves on her shoulder. He pulled back slightly and she rose back up on her knees, bringing her face up closer to his own. Her soft, tremulous smile, the unshed tears in her eyes—for him! Tears for him!—the cool curves of her body, the mating bond singing between them… they all conspired against his self-control and he lowered his head and kissed her.

She made a noise. Low in her throat. Her lips parted. Her tongue traced his lips, his teeth, his soft palate. He blessed his respiratory bypass. He blessed the 20,000 nerve receptors in his lips. He blessed the 300 nerve receptors in his hands, weaving through her hair. She pulled away and gasped in air and he needed to breathe, too, and—oh. She smelled **fantastic**.

She pulled him up to his feet, but it was easy, he would follow that smell anywhere. She wanted him. She had chosen him and she wanted him. This was not fickle human desire. This was Gallifreyan. This was real.

She pulled him to the bed, pulled him down over her, making sure his narrow hips lay between her spread legs. He could feel himself breaching—his **_kamdarak_** opening up, his **_arok_** emerging—as her scent triggered old, primitive parts of his brain. He slipped inside her, so easy, so welcomed, and he felt the release of bonding hormone and the compulsion to claim her, to bite that muscle along her shoulder, and he did—oh he did!—and she turned languid under him. Her half-lidded eyes sought his own, a smile playing on her lips and she trailed her hands down his back. She arched up underneath him— _no, don’t, don’t buck me off, no, don’t leave_ —but he felt himself settle deeper into her and her accompanying moan of pleasure. Her **_filakha_** were rippling around him— _no, too fast, too soon! she’ll leave when we’re done! she needs to stay!_ —he pulled back a little.

“Theta?” she asked.

“A moment. Give me a moment.” She nodded, puzzled but compliant. He focused—he had never focused so much—retracting the flared head of his **_arok_** and pulling out without causing her distress.

“Doctor?” she frowned. “What’s wrong?”

He grinned at her and she smiled back tentatively.

“Oh, Rose Tyler, I’m going to make this last.”

~~~ * ~~~

He settled her on her side on his bed, spooning around her, sliding one of his legs between her own and propping her open. The scent of her arousal tinged the air and he felt himself stir again. He slipped inside her from the back, rocking gently until he felt seated deep inside, then lowered his leg so she closed around him. She shuddered under his fingers, as he ran them up over her breasts and throat and down her shoulders and arm, trailing the pads of his first two fingers down her hip and to the front of her **_kamdarak_**. He traced a finger around the lips of the opening, the faintest, lightest touch he could, and he felt her **_shakaral_** pressing against him—but not in the right place. He tucked his chin over her shoulder and murmured in the curving shell of her ear, “And that’s why we’re doing it this way, Rose Tyler. I would have been spent already, if it were up to you. All wasted.” And he gently nibbled on the edge of her ear, then tongued the soft area behind her earlobe, over the throbbing artery in her neck. She sucked in air unevenly through her teeth as he rocked against her, slowly and gently. He skimmed one hand up from her opening, across her belly and under her bosom. His thumbnail scraped oh-so-delicately along the underside of one pert breast. Her rhythm broke suddenly and she trembled, her **_shakaral_** pressing again and again.

“Doctor,” she gasped, her **_filakha_** stuttering around him, unaligned and disorganized. Did later him not take this kind of time with her? Was she that used to immediate gratification?

“Oh, no, Rose Tyler, you don’t get me that easily,” he replied, licking his thumb and index finger then gently rolling one of her nipples between them. Her chest thrust out and her hips thrust backward in response and the rippling of her **_filakha_** began to fall into a pattern.

He slowed his motions, despite everything she did to speed up their movements. He was going to make their time together last, by Rassilon! The flared tip of his **_arok_** slid through her **_filakha_** like his fingers passed through her hair. Languid. Sensual. Deliberate. Over and over and over. Memorizing every moment, cataloguing every sensation. She was warm. Slick. Wanting. Wanting him. He could feel the desire swirling up in her, Gallifreyan body at war with human habits, as she ground against him. Those unexpected movements were setting his own neurons on fire, as their bond called out to be completed.

She turned her head, breasts pressing into his hand, pelvis arcing back into his, and reached up to touch his temple with her fingers. “Theta, please,” she groaned and he let her make contact.

Her thoughts were a jumble of images and emotions. Some brown-haired pretty boy spilling out Gallifreyan curses and endearments as she writhed under him, flashes of his own face smiling tenderly as love welled up in her whole body, desire flooding her system as his hands cradled a harp, glee that he was finally—finally!—touching her with these hands and this body, strain as she struggled to keep her **_temekarn_** open in this position (as much as it pleased her for him to take such time and care for her pleasure, she desperately wanted to hold his seed for her future).

With that thought, his hand rose to her temple automatically and he spilled himself into her out of raw shock.

~~~ * ~~~

Once he recovered from being turned inside out, he slipped from her easily. A little trickle of his fluids came after him, the balance retained within her. Her pride in him, her desire for him, her joy in having him, all buzzed through his mind as they lay entwined on his bed. She turned over and smiled at him.

There was nothing else they needed to say as they began again, this time looking into each other’s faces. He had never felt more unworthy—and yet so grateful she thought otherwise—when her **_shakaral_** set him off properly and she gripped his arse with her strong small hands as he filled her again and again and again. No sooner had they finished, than her urgency and love, as well as his desire for contact, set them on the path to begin again. He had never imagined having a low refractory period would ever be a Gallifreyan trait he would use.

She even—he’d thought it was merely some human affectation, putting their mouths on each other’s genitals—but it was **fantastic**. Her mouth! That tongue! His brain shut down completely for the first time since graduation. Nine hundred years and he’d never had his brain function disappear in a tsunami of sensation like this. For brief moments, he forgot everything—who he was, what he was, the Time War—everything. Everything except the feeling of her.

After that, he just had to return the favor, smelling her—good nose, him—tasting her, hearing her thoughts and enjoyment blur out as pleasure rushed through her system. He’d never gotten a **_shakaral_** in the chin before. It made him laugh. He hadn’t laughed like that in centuries.

They wrapped themselves around each other and drifted into a doze, thoughts as entangled as their bodies. Flashes of her past and his future darted through her mind. She didn’t have the innate discipline to keep them from him, this version of him, anyway. She was probably used to sharing everything with the later version of him, anyway. The sinking realization pulled him out of their merged thoughts: _The TARDIS was going to have to block everything that happened today._

~~~ * ~~~

They dressed and wandered hand in hand to the console room. She bent over and picked up his leather jacket and, with reverent ceremony, helped him into it. In return, he sank to his knees in front of her and gently kissed above her **_kamdarak_** before turning his face up to look at her. Before he could turn his feelings into thoughts, let alone words, she brushed both thumbs across his cheekbones, then back along the curl of his ears.

 _: :Never.: :_ she thought to him. _: :You’re the one I loved first. You’re unforgettable.: :_

He wrapped his arms around her hips and basked in her grace. She pulled him up and put her arms around him, swaying in place. “I won’t be able to remember a thing from today,” he murmured into her hair, loss already threading through his thoughts.

“You’ll be able to remember that you need me,” she replied, pulling back to grab his head by the ears and yank him down into a passionate kiss. He could taste her tears.

~~~ * ~~~

“You know where and when to take him, old girl,” she said, patting the console of his TARDIS. Even his TARDIS was conspiring against him, keeping him pressed into the jumpseat. The strange woman—he knew her, he could swear he knew her, but it was all slipping away, the TARDIS was blocking the memories from him—stroked his cheek and kissed his mouth gently. The taste of her kiss stirred parts of him he thought had died with Gallifrey, along with the presence of her Gallifreyan thoughts. “Go back for me, Doctor,” she whispered. “Pluck me from my beans-on-toast life and help me blossom.”

Her fingers trailed down his neck and chest, arm and hand and slowly pulled away. She dropped a final kiss in his palm, then curled his fingers around it.

“I love you,” she said, and was gone. Her mind tore from his with the sealing of the TARDIS doors, leaving him aching and bloodied again.

He felt his eyelids droop as his body slid bonelessly from the seat to the floor.

He was alone.

~~~ * ~~~

The TARDIS woke him from a sprawl on the console room floor with an abrupt hum. He shouldn’t be sleeping. He didn’t deserve to sleep. He had a cut on his forehead that he used the sonic screwdriver to repair. No need to bleed on the TARDIS’s controls—the Old Girl didn’t deserve that, either. He gave himself a shake. No more sleeping. No matter how little time had passed since his regeneration. Time to get back to his responsibilities. He had no time to waste sleeping—

—he’d never mentioned that the TARDIS traveled in time! He almost whacked his forehead on the console in frustration. _What’s happened to my brains, this regeneration? Did I spend them growing these ears? I didn’t mention time travel?_

The Doctor reached across the console, hitting the immediate return button. He’d make sure Rose Tyler had **all** the information before she made her final choice to stay on Earth or travel with him. She **had to** travel with him. It was the only way that fantastic girl was going to bloom into everything she could be. The rotor stopped and he strode to the doors as they opened. He leaned out and smirked.

“Did I also mention it travels in time?”


End file.
